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Vacuum chucks as hovercraft conveyor

Highly sensitive products like glass substrate for flat displays need to be handled extremely carefully or even better not manually handled at all. The Basler company took this to heart: Their quality control specialists offer equipment with a hovercraft transport conveyor belt system, which comprises of Witte modules. The original application for these modules was vacuum clamping.

Flat displays are of great interest nowadays. Demand has risen not only for small, simple applications such as checking screens?, LCD displays, digital cameras, camcorders and PDAs? But also for large, flat computer and television screens. Parallel with the dimensions the requirements on manufacturing processes have increased: Who is going to buy a faulty screen, even if only even one pixel is defective?

This demand for quality directly affects the important components of such screens, for instance on coated glass (substrate). Even small faults – holes, scratches etc. – can change pixels or sub pixels and influence the performance. For this reason the screen manufacturers aim to achieve zero defect quality. Companies based mainly in Asia, especially Taiwan and Korea, are meanwhile integrating the very best quality control systems into their manufacturing lines, which cost between 500 and 700 million dollars.